The recreational use of snowmobiles has increased significantly in recent years. The development of this recreation has led to the use of ever more powerful and heavy machines (many typically weighing 600 lbs. or more). Any snowmobile can become mired in deep or soft snow when the vehicle's drive track loses traction and the snowmobile settles in the snow. The advent of larger vehicles and the capability of travel further afield (where ungroomed or previously untracked terrain is often encountered) has made such entrenchment of snowmobiles an even more difficult problem for riders to resolve.
When so entrenched, the snowmobile's rear body, including the drive track, is typically settled deeper into the snow than is the front end of the vehicle (including the skis) due to the significant weight differential of the vehicle from front to rear. Heretofore, by far the most common way to free the snowmobile at this point has been to have someone assist by standing at the front of the vehicle and pull forward on a ski as best possible given the tractionless environment. Thus, the only assisting force (i.e., in addition to the operation of the entrenched vehicle itself) is often that usually uneven and non--constant force such a person can develop directly at the front of the snowmobile working from the same deep and/or soft snow that has trapped the vehicle in the first place. The task, as may be appreciated, is often not a simple one, taking many attempts to extract the snowmobile. Moreover, it is not unheard of for the assisting person to become an obstacle or even be run over as the vehicle is freed.
Various devices and apparatus have heretofore been suggested and or utilized to provide a more reliable, safe and/or simplified process of extrication of snowmobiles when thus bogged in deep and/or soft snow. Such devices have included winching and/or ratcheting mechanisms (see, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,560,441 and 5,697,597), and standard ropes, cables, tow straps and the like. However, some such apparatus are cumbersome to carry and/or utilize, and may be unduly complex for application in the field and under widely varying conditions.
Many of the others, such as standard fiber cordage, cable, straps and the like, while moving the assistant away from the front of the snowmobile and/or allowing use of a companion's vehicle to provide a pulling force, do little to overcome the problem of developing sufficient assisting force to move a typical 600 lb. entrenched snowmobile in a tractionless environment. These approaches also include no means of evening out the assisting force (i.e., providing constancy of tension) as the vehicle begins to move, and thus backsliding remains a problem. Further consideration of the particular problems and task of freeing entrenched snowmobiles could thus still be utilized.